What Is a Trace? A Runtime Verification Perspective

Abstract

Abstract. Runtime Monitoring or Verification deals with traces. In its most simple form a monitoring system takes a trace produced by a system and a specification of correct behaviour and checks if the trace conforms to the specification. More complex applications may introduce notions of feedback and reaction. The notion that unifies the field is that we can abstract the runtime behaviour of a system by an execution trace and check this for conformance. However, there is little uniform understanding of what a trace is. This is most keenly seen when comparing theoretical and practical work. This paper surveys the different notions of trace and reflects on the related issues.

COST Action IC1402 Runtime Verification Beyond Monitoring

“…A number of trace formats were introduced and refined in the above competitions including CSV, JSON, and XML formats. These have been the subject of further exploration and discussion [33,26]. -Encouraging a Conversation.…”

Introduction to Runtime Verification

“…We have not attempted to make a full survey of all related work but we refer to the main relevant literature [76,98,110,137]. When considering how to check whether the runtime behaviour of a system conforms to some specification there are three necessary steps to be taken:…”

A Report of RV-CuBES 2017

“…One of the position statements explicitly discussed the former, and the latter is a key issue in CRV and will be discussed further below. With relation to trace formats, it was noted that industry are already frequently recording traces and analysing these and there exist a number of formats (mostly ad-hoc) for recording this information [27], although these formats are not designed to record the information needed for runtime verification. It was agreed that more should be done to take advantage of the abundance of existing traces being produced.…”